Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Well, I don't know all the methods that spammers use to harvest email addresses but I got mildly chewed out for putting in email addresses in the reply-to citations of my emails. I was told to PCYMTNQREAIYR to fix my replies.

Which I did by configuring Gnus to omit the raw email address in the replies.

;;; setting the reply to omit email address to avoid spam harvesting;;; see the documentation for line format and the line-function has to;;; be set explicitly, as per the Changelog.(setq message-citation-line-format "On %a, %b %d %Y,%F %L wrote:\n")(setq message-citation-line-function 'message-insert-formatted-citation-line)

Thanks to Daniel Pittman for pointing it out. Though I'm not sure whether it breaks any standards or prevents citation folding, at least for the Gnus mail client at the receiving end.And there are other acronyms on the cygwin page that are made up that might be of use too, so be sure to read it

Saturday, May 15, 2010

The article itself is clear on who brought the knives out and helped in cashiering the idea of selling direct. The user comments are even more interesting in that it outlines all the standard issues that people with phones face and how weird their experience is when they got the phone from Google and the carriers hadn't a clue about supporting it.

Saturday, May 8, 2010

From the changelog or by C-h n, here's a quick abbreviated list of my personal, noteworthy changes in this release, as I see it. Of course, you'd need to read the NEWS file to see the entire list of changes.

** The maximum size of buffers (and the largest fixnum) is doubled.On typical 32bit systems, buffers can now be up to 512MB.

** The pointer now becomes invisible when typing.Customize `make-pointer-invisible' to disable this feature.

** New command `async-shell-command', bound globally to `M-&'.This executes the command asynchronously, similar to calling `M-!' and manually adding an ampersand to the end of the command. With `M-&', you don't need the ampersand. The output appears in the buffer `*Async Shell Command*'.

*** A new command `zrgrep' searches recursively in gzipped files.

** CEDET (the Collection of Emacs Development Tools) is now in Emacs.This is a collection of packages to aid with using Emacs as an IDE (integrated development environment):

*** The Semantic package allows the use of parsers to intelligently edit and navigate source code. Parsers for C/C++, Java, Javascript, and several other languages are included by default, and Semantic can also interface with external tools such as GNU Global and GNU Idutils.

To enable Semantic, use the global minor mode `semantic-mode'. See the Semantic manual for details.

*** EDE (Emacs Development Environment) is a package for managing code projects, including features such as automatic Makefile generation.

To enable EDE, use the minor mode `global-ede-mode'. See the EDE manual for details.

** htmlfontify.el turns a fontified Emacs buffer into an HTML page.

The last one, you'll love it when you want to share code with a non Emacs, non IDE user. I believe it might be the same thing as htmlize.el.

Wednesday, May 5, 2010

I wonder why they do this, that anything old and that works perfectly well needs to be atrophied and become an internet relic. Like Gopher. Being a gnus user, I of course have an axe to grind, though I have no subscription to any Microsoft newsgroups.

I'm afraid, other companies too would also head for the exits and remove their news servers and everyone ends up on flashy, kitschy website that produces a horrid amount of hits for simple web searches.

My primary objections to forums are that you need a browser, logins and lots of clicking hither and thither to get things done and I'm yet to see a good forum software whose search feature works well. Besides, there is something soothing about text only postings viewed in my news reader.

Sunday, May 2, 2010

Well, at a short 34 pages (PDF), it's definitely smaller than the 200 page manual. And it just goes to show, how much development has gone into org-mode keeping the same simplicity(well, you could argue this doc refutes that notion) but extending it do lots of other things like LaTeX publishing.

I got started on LaTeX with the The Not So Short Introduction to LATEX2ε (PDF) which convinced me to use LaTeX to prepare my reports, presentations and letters. And that's definitely longer than the 34 pages of this tutorial.

Saturday, April 17, 2010

From the emacs newsgroup, one way to get to back to the last editing location in the file is described here in this thread. Pretty useful, if you jump between a lot of files and need to scroll down to the end every time or some such repeatable action.

Presumably, one would use this feature only when required, as HTML is not something that is recommended as mail text as there is no guarantee that mail clients would be able to render it or render it the way you'd initially formatted the HTML.

Stick to plain text; Besides, if you're going all flashy in getting your point across, you've got a bigger problem than using HTML to say it.

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

If you don't provide support and let the customers run around, it comes back to bite you. While the competition, *cough*, that fruit company is pumping out better versions of its products and shipping a few million phones in a few days or weeks.

Having a great product is one thing, letting customers down is only going to make it difficult to get acceptance. For the sea of developers who got the phone free to develop applications to rival the App store, this is going to be a bit frustrating.A dream phone, nice development platform, having it all knackered by the lack of customer service!

Though, I do wonder how much of it is cultural or customer behaviour issues. I'd rather feel, touch and play with the phone before I order online. And if I have to hunt for specific outlets to just see it and hold it in my hands, well, my enthusiasm soon flags.

It's not like I'm a nerd or something. :)

More importantly, this might be the only leverage carriers can exert influence on Google, I think. From advertising to store placement and sales training that's a long time line that Google can't afford but must do. Every ask and feature by the carriers will only delay the roll outs. With different vendors for different parts of the mobile phone business (manufacturer, carriers etc), it's not going to be easy.

This is not going to be like Amazon shipping something off. Every detail that the carriers and networks need, they'd have to adhere to or get around to putting it in. They'd have to do that, till the phone products have critical mass so that it is evident to the customer that the phone has a support infrastructure in its place from calling plans, software and hardware.

Lots of plodding to do. Lots.

And if they do that, other mobile companies will beat them at it; they have been at this far longer. The first mover advantage is gone; unless they come out with a better business model, they're stuck with the current one and they'd get clobbered.

Sunday, February 14, 2010

As someone who's sort of hitting the 60 mail threshold of official mails to respond daily and that's NOT counting the unrelated friends,sales,ad pitches emails(yeah I counted for a week and then gave up), Google Buzz is exactly the kind of thing that makes me want to give up electronic communications altogether.

Trying to control my inbox, I've switched to working the phones as much as I can though I still have to send followup email 'As discussed....' just in case, the conversation 'supposedly' never took place. :-) That in itself is tiring, from the talking and the inability to reach some quick conclusions and closing the call. Imagine, trying to follow up on SMS like posts on a meeting that you have a hard time recollecting? I'd be back on the mailbox trying to explain/clarify/correct things leading to another chain mail thread.

Right, this is not something which will get used in a corporate setting, you say? Where I work, email and internal chat tool are the standard communication tools. In all likelihood, they might try a pilot with a bunch of new recruits.

Really enthusiastic bunch, those guys. :-)

If it ever gets adopted, lots of people are done for. Especially managers who handle new recruits. At least in my place. The amount of texting these chaps do are unbelievable. If they even do a fraction of that on a similar corporate solution, it's going to be a fantastic explosion of real time thinking which I think no one wants to know.

With my friends list (we KNOW Emacs users have millions of friends, right,right?), I don't have a problem now. And to be on the safe side, I've switched it all off. So email it is, folks, to reach me.

Monday, January 11, 2010

If you're starting to learn Emacs, you'd probably would have grabbed bits and pieces of elisp code from different places on the web and plugged into your .emacs. Mostly, it would have worked without any issues. But as you keep using Emacs, you tend to forget all that you initially copied and keep adding new ones.

Soon, you have a lot of cruft in your .emacs and one day when you upgrade,make some change or add more elisp code, Emacs errors out on the .emacs code.

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

I think it is a bad idea to have this turned on by default. There is too little privacy already and anything that triangulates you is a weapon sooner or later. I have been reading Mozilla's Geolocation page and wondering why the permissions have been designed the way it is. The default is to share your location and to undo it, you have to do it site by site.

That is weird as you'd probably have to do it laboriously for each site.

Why not have a privacy tab panel to gather the sites that you have already given permission and nuke it selectively or all of them at one go?

Well, I have simply turned off the entire feature by changing the default in the about:config settings as mentioned in the above page.